Month: January 2010

I’ve talked about PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA in the past – almost a year ago now.

Back then the feature was just coming together in to something useable, and was on the cusp of moving towards code review. It entered code review, and went around, and around for 9 months, whilst various refinements were made.

Never the less, Marc Alff persevered (much respect!), and yesterday pushed his final merge in to the mysql-next-mr bzr tree. PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA is now awaiting the next milestone release, and will be a part of the next GA release of MySQL!

This first round adds the infrastructure to take monitoring of the MySQL Server to the next level, initially adding in instrumentation for sync points (mutexes, rw locks, etc.) and file IO, in the SQL layer, and most of the default storage engines (all those controlled by MySQL/Sun).

Here’s a shout out to the other storage engine developers – we’d love you to start looking at instrumenting your own engines as well. Ask away on the internals@ list – I’m sure Marc will be more than willing to help.

And now that we have the above in – what’s next? It’s a good question! Here’s a list of the major outstanding worklogs:

The treatment of dolphins has long been an issue for me, I utterly despise some of the things I have seen, and read about. MySQL’s dolphin – Sakila – has always been seen as a symbol of freedom. This is marred by reality, hopefully this will change:

“The researchers argue that their work shows it is morally unacceptable to keep such intelligent animals in amusement parks or to kill them for food or by accident when fishing. Some 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises die in this way each year.”

Some other things in the article also ring true for me, in other ways. 🙂

“The studies show how dolphins have distinct personalities, a strong sense of self and can think about the future.”

“It has also become clear that they are â??culturalâ? animals, meaning that new types of behaviour can quickly be picked up by one dolphin from another.”

“Other research has shown dolphins can solve difficult problems, while those living in the wild co-operate in ways that imply complex social structures and a high level of emotional sophistication.”